I’m Nell Painter and I speak to you as historian and citizen of this magnificent, huge, unruly, flawed, limited, inspiring and long-running experiment in multi-racial democracy, a country, our country born of sentiments that still resonate globally: All men – now all people – are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness… These ideals continue to attract people as immigrants and as tourists. Institutions around the world build on our Declaration of Independence. Yet the tensions within our origins persist.

The United States was founded in genocide and involuntary servitude that came to be defined racially. The blood in our history remains vivid in memory, well, in the memory of some of us. Other Americans have chosen forgetting. We celebrate our efforts toward redress of original sins and rightly congratulate ourselves on restitutions. Largely forgotten is a history of pogroms. For just as Americans have been able to wage and largely win a struggle for legal civil rights, our history of domestic warfare is not recalled. When we experience each new outburst of violence – whether individual killings or mass shootings – and we want to wax nostalgic about better times, we erase from our memories a steady history of violence including these markers:

New Orleans, 1866, an attack on black Republicans and their white allies that killed 50 people. Marias River, Montana Territory, 1870, the U.S. Army slaughter of some 200 Piegan Blackfoot Indians. Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898, an attack on black office holders that, officially, killed 25 people, with hundreds more bodies dumped in the Cape Fear River. Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921, an attack on a prosperous black neighborhood killed 36 by official count, many more unofficially and hundreds turned into refugees. Money, Mississippi, 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old who contravened white supremacy’s gender ideals, tortured and murdered. Birmingham, Alabama, 1963, a church bombed on Sunday morning killing 4 girls putting on their choir robes.

Then and now, a substantial portion of the American citizenry have objected to black power. Which brings us to our current predicament of a presidential nominee who borrows from white supremacists. Donald Trump is attuned to the white backlash against a black man in power. Trump is unprecedented because Obama is unprecedented. Without Barack Obama as president, there would be no Donald Trump as presidential nominee.

Oh, no, you might answer, there are real economic reasons for Trump’s popularity, reasons that have nothing to do with a black president: Trump’s acolytes are hurting economically. Well, then, I ask, why aren’t they Democrats. Why do they support the political party of tax cuts for the wealthy and the privatization of Social Security? Why do they elect representatives who govern against the economic interests of working people? The answer lies in how many voters’ racial identity outweighs their economic self-interest.

In the 2016 presidential election, the configuration of white racial identity that leads to Donald Trump is bad for all of us but especially bad for those of us of color. The writer Karen Good Marable’s phrasing, « mental anguish and a violence on the souls of black folk », recalls W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin. She was writing about Sandra Bland, but Good Marable might well have included non-black Americans whose empathy crosses the color line.

The brutality of Donald Trump’s speech is already contaminating our whole society. Even before whatever mischief he might inflict as president, whatever policies he might champion, and whichever Supreme Cout justices he might nominate, he is already poisoning our public sphere. He is already fouling our magnificent, huge, unruly, flawed, limited, inspiring and long-running experiment in multiracial democracy. He has already increased the tensions between the ideals of our origins and its roots in racial subjugation. There is already too much blood in our past to elect this man.